New Rural Focus of Plague, Algeria | CDC EID

EID Journal Home > Volume 16, Number 10–October 2010
Volume 16, Number 10–October 2010
Letter
New Rural Focus of Plague, Algeria

Idir Bitam, Saravanan Ayyadurai, Tahar Kernif, Mohammed Chetta, Nabil Boulaghman, Didier Raoult, and Michel Drancourt Comments to Author
Author affiliations: Institut Pasteur d’Algérie, Hamma, Algeria (I. Bitam, T. Kernif); Université de la Méditerranée, Marseille, France (S. Ayyadurai, D. Raoult, M. Drancourt); and Hôpital Universitaire de Laghouat, Laghouat, Algeria (M. Chetta, N. Boulaghman)

Suggested citation for this article

To the Editor: Plague is a deadly rodent-associated flea-borne zoonosis caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis (1). Human plague periodically reemerges in so-called plague foci, as illustrated by the 2003 reemergence of human plague in the Oran area, Algeria (2,3). We report emergence of a new plague focus in a remote region of Algeria.

In July 2008, three patients came to Laghouat University Hospital with signs of severe infection and painful, inflamed, enlarged lymph nodes suggestive of buboes. One additional patient became ill with pneumonia and coma after a bubo appeared. The patients were nomads living in a 24-person camp in Thait El Maa in the Laghouat area, 550 km southwest of Algiers (Figure). Plague was confirmed by culturing Y. pestis from 1 bubo aspirate. Ten days of oral doxycycline (4 mg/kg/d) combined with oral rifampin (20 mg/kg/d) and intramuscular gentamicin (3 mg/kg/d) cured the patients with bubonic plague, but the patient with pneumonic plague died.

In January 2009, eight individuals of the rodent species Meriones shawii (Shaw’s jird) and 2 Psamommys obesus (fat sand rats) were trapped inside nomads’ tents (H.P. Sherman Traps, Tallahassee, FL, USA). At time of capture, there was a cold wind with blowing sand, and, after visual inspection of the rodents, efforts to recover fleas failed. DNA from the rodents’ spleens was extracted by using the QIAamp Tissue Kit (QIAGEN, Hilden, Germany) at the Medical Entomology Unit Laboratory, Pasteur Institute, Algiers, and subjected to PCR amplification of the plasminogen activator gene (pla) from 6 M. shawii jirds. Negative controls (DNA extracted from uninfected fleas maintained as colonies in Medical Entomology Unit Laboratory was used in the absence of negative animal tissue) remained negative.

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Suggested Citation for this Article

Bitam I, Ayyadurai S, Kernif T, Chetta M, Boulaghman N, Raoult D, et al. New rural focus of plague, Algeria [letter]. Emerg Infect Dis [serial on the Internet]. 2010 Oct [date cited].
http://www.cdc.gov/EID/content/16/10/1639.htm

DOI: 10.3201/eid1610.091854